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Elinor Karlsson has a special interest in diseases shared between humans and dogs. She recently launched the citizen science-driven Darwin’s Dogs project, which invites all dog owners to participate directly in research exploring the genetic basis of dog behavior, as well as diseases such as OCD and cancer. Come and discover what her research has uncovered about dogs as well as their human friends.

This fascinating public talk will open the Annual Conference of the Genetics Society of AustralAsia, an international meeting of genetics researchers from Australasia and beyond, proudly hosted for the first time by Genetics Otago at the University of Otago on 2-6 July 2017.

About Elinor Karlsson

Elinor is an assistant professor in bioinformatics and integrative biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Her research focuses on using our own evolutionary history to understand how the genome works, and how that knowledge can lead to advances in healthcare. Elinor Karlsson has a special interest in diseases shared between humans and dogs. She recently launched the citizen science-driven Darwin’s Dogs project, which invites all dog owners to participate directly in research exploring the genetic basis of dog behavior, as well as diseases such as OCD and cancer.

Her current projects also include the 200 Mammals Genome Project, an international effort to compare hundreds of different mammalian genomes and identify critically important segments of DNA, and the evolution of resistance to ancient infectious diseases, like cholera, in people. Elinor received her B.A. in biochemistry, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, from Rice University, and her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Boston University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University before starting her own research group in 2014.